Anamorphic
Also known as: anamorphic lens, squeeze lens
A lens that squeezes a wide field onto a standard sensor, so an ultrawide image is recorded without throwing away pixels.
Updated
What it means
An anamorphic lens compresses horizontally. The recorded frame looks squashed and is stretched back in post, which produces a wide shape without cropping anything away. Nothing is discarded, only reshaped on the way to the sensor.
The alternative is a crop. A Letterbox gets the same proportions by discarding the top and bottom, where anamorphic keeps the full sensor height and all of its pixels instead.
The look comes with it. Oval highlights, a particular kind of Lens flare and a shallower feel are side effects that became the reason people use these lenses in the first place.
How it works in practice
The squeeze factor has to be known. A clip recorded at 1.33x or 1.55x needs the matching stretch applied, and a Preset for it belongs in the project settings rather than being applied clip by clip.
Monitoring is the awkward part. Judging framing on a squashed image is difficult, so a desqueezed preview is the thing to set up before filming rather than after.
Action camera adapters exist and are limited. A small adapter on a GoPro produces the shape and loses sharpness at the edges, which is a trade worth testing before a real session depends on it.
What to watch out for
Forgetting the stretch produces an unusable clip. A squeezed file edited as though it were normal looks wrong in a way nobody can quite name until somebody points it out to them.
Stabilisation fights it. Video stabilization applied before the desqueeze works on the wrong geometry entirely, so the order of operations matters a great deal more than usual.
It is heavy and fragile for action work. Adapters add weight to a mount and glass to break, which is a poor fit for a Helmet mount on a rough descent through trees.
How RawClip handles it
Squeezed footage needs the stretch applied before anything else, since the analysis reads the picture as recorded. A clip left squeezed is scored on a distorted image, which is one of the few preparation steps worth doing before anything is uploaded.